Regency Romp 03 - The Alabaster Hip

by Maggie Fenton

  Lord Marlowe was Essex, who had, for years, written such profundity as to leave her and most of England half in love with him. But Essex was also Marlowe—a man she had started to love for all of his eccentricities months ago. Now, with the merging of his two identities, he was an even more complex creature than she could have ever fathomed. And one of the most unfathomable things about him was his tendre for her.

  She’d been infuriated at first when she’d discovered he’d imagined her as the nymph in “The Alabaster Hip,” but the fury had faded and left in its wake utter bafflement. How he could see anything nymphworthy in her was quite beyond her ken. It had seemed further proof to her that he was mocking her, as he’d mocked her from their first conversation in West Barming, with all his talk of fey creatures.

  But now—now she was rather certain he’d been serious in his allusions. Even if she could never see herself as he apparently saw her, she realized he had never mocked her.

  How could she compete, though? He’d declared his love for her in front of half the ton, and then done so again while at the mercy of a lunatic kidnapper. Even “The Alabaster Hip” had been a declaration, though she’d not known it at the time. All of these grand gestures, and she’d given him nothing in return but contempt. She didn’t want to be the sort of person who punished the people they loved out of pettiness . . . though that was exactly the sort she was fast becoming when it came to Marlowe.

  But just when she’d made up her mind to accept all he’d offered, he’d retreated. It was maddening, but it was not unjustified. Why should he continue to give so much when she refused to give anything in return?

  It was her turn to make a Grand Gesture.

  When Minerva had made the mistake of wondering aloud over tea if she should just climb into the viscount’s bedroom window to confront him, she’d been joking, but the duchess, of course, had thought it a brilliant idea. And before Minerva’s head could stop spinning, she’d somehow found herself agreeing to this nighttime misadventure.

  Lord only knew what Astrid had told her husband—or done to him—to get him to let her leave Montford House in the dead of night with only Newcomb in attendance. Minerva suspected she didn’t want to know.

  Only the fear of climbing all the way back down the half-rotted ladder kept her from abandoning the mad scheme altogether and calling upon the viscount like a normal person in the morning instead. She was never listening to the duchess again.

  When she pulled herself over the top of the ladder and onto a stone balcony, the impracticality of her plan only seemed to be confirmed. The room beyond was closed up tight, with no hint of life beyond its locked doors.

  She sighed and leaned over the stone railing, searching for some glimpse of the duchess. She could just make out the shadow of her friend crouching among the shrubbery.

  “He’s not in his room!” she called down as loudly as she dared.

  Whatever the duchess might have answered was drowned out by the deep voice behind her, so close to her ear it made her jump.

  “Minerva?”

  She spun around to find Marlowe standing practically on top of her, his large form temptingly warm despite the nip in the air. The balcony doors now stood open behind him, the dim light of a single gas lamp she’d not noticed before casting a weak glow across his broad shoulders. He wore nothing but an overlarge lawn shirt and inexpressibles, his dark curls in disarray, his feet bare.

  “What are you doing?” He sounded curious but careful, his mouth turned up at the edges as if he were prepared to be amused by her and little else. His rich brown eyes caught the moonlight in a manner that, had she been Essex, she’d have waxed poetic about for several stanzas. But the only words she had at hand to describe them were beautiful . . .

  And cautious. Her heart sank at the shuttered look he wore.

  He was obviously done with wearing his heart on his sleeve, back to the indecipherable viscount she’d first met . . . though without even that incarnation’s irreverence. This was the viscount who’d faced his family over the dinner table like a general going to battle. This was the viscount who still mourned his wife and brother despite their betrayal—this was the viscount who was used to getting hurt.

  “I was attempting, rather poorly, to make a Grand Gesture,” she muttered.

  His brow furrowed in confusion, and he started to say something, but the sound of hushed, angry voices and the rustle of bushes below them caught the attention of them both. He leaned over the balcony’s edge, and she followed suit. “Did you climb up here?” he asked, catching sight of the ladder. “And is that Montford carrying his wife out of my garden?”

  “Yes,” she said to the first question. “And that is very likely,” she said to the second, as she watched the tall, shadowy form of the duke pass through the garden gate with a pouting duchess in his arms. Montford must have caught on to his wife’s nighttime scheme and had come to fetch her home…or at least attempt to. He didn’t seem to get very far before Astrid had successfully distracted him yet again. Minerva blushed and averted her eyes when the duke set his wife down and began to kiss her rather passionately on the other side of the gate.

  Marlowe coughed and turned his attention back to the ladder, his cheeks suspiciously rosy as well. He frowned. “You climbed up that old thing?” he demanded rather disapprovingly. “You could have killed yourself.”

  She put her hands on her hips. This was not going at all as she’d envisioned it. “You scaled five stories without anything but a fever,” she pointed out.

  “The risk was acceptable.”

  And in his mad brain it would always be, for he’d do anything for his daughters, no matter how barmy. It was one of the things she loved best about him. But he always underestimated his own value. “So was this,” she said firmly, for she’d do anything for him.

  He gave her a skeptical look and turned on his heel to return to his bedchamber. She followed behind him and watched him pace rather awkwardly between the unlit fireplace and the escritoire. She noticed the small desk was cluttered with stacks of half-used foolscap, ruined quills, and empty inkpots. She peered inside the grate and could just make out a pile of balled-up papers waiting for incineration. Judging from these rather blatant clues and the ink staining his fingertips, he’d been writing—though it looked as if things had not been going well.

  She could read other signs of his distress in the lamplight—dark bruises under his eyes and a tautness at the edges of his mouth that reminded her too much of his joyless father. He looked wan and even thinner than at their last meeting, as if his unhappiness were sucking the very marrow out of him—marrow he could scarce afford to lose.

  He was not meant to be a skinny man, not with those massive shoulders and broad chest. But she supposed he would always be a man of extremes without someone to care for him properly.

  Well, she planned on being that someone.

  “I never gave you my answer,” she said, gathering up her courage.

  It took him a while to puzzle out what she was talking about, but when he did, he paused in his pacing. His shoulders slumped, and he began to fuss around his desktop, stacking papers and gathering up his quills.

  “I thought I’d give you time to make your decision,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

  “I’ve not seen you in a week,” she huffed.

  “I thought it best not to torment myself—or you—until you had made up your mind.”

  Well, that sounded painfully self-pitying. But what did she expect, really, from a man who’d once written two volumes’ worth of sonnets on heartbreak?

  “Only if you didn’t want me to accept your offer of marriage,” she countered. “I assure you, I could reconsider, if it would torment you less.”

  The papers tumbled from his slack hands and all over his feet. He finally met her eyes for the first time all night. He looked ridiculously confused. “What?”

  “I said, I would accept your offer. I would have done so after the abduction, but yo
u ran off before I could get a word out.” Granted, he’d not so much run off as been carried out by Inigo with a concussion, but he was not the only one given to hyperbole when feeling overemotional.

  “What?” he repeated, dumbfounded, though there was a spark in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.

  “I don’t know how to be any clearer. It’s been a week since I’ve seen you, so I’ve had to resort to this. Climbing through windows as if I were a common thief . . . or a Leighton.” He gave a weak smile at this. “Living with the duchess has done something horrible to me, Marlowe.”

  “You were climbing statuary long before Montford’s,” he pointed out. “But I still don’t . . . Minerva, please, if you are toying with me, I could not bear it.”

  “I am perfectly sincere,” she said crisply. “Though it seems you have given up on me.”

  “Never!” he said, his voice hoarse and so very, very contrite. “I was just busy . . .” He waved his hands at the escritoire, then at the littered fireplace, as if that would explain himself.

  “Writing?”

  He cleared his throat, his cheeks pink, his brow furrowed in consternation. “Attempting to, at least. Following Jem’s sage advice. You wanted a poem.”

  She didn’t know whether to be charmed or exasperated. “I don’t need a poem, Marlowe. Just you.”

  He looked at her skeptically, determined to doubt her. She supposed she couldn’t blame him. “Nevertheless, I wanted to be well armed before our next battle.”

  “Then let us have a treaty instead,” she said, approaching him slowly, as she would a skittish animal. “I am done with this war between us.”

  A little bit more of the tension went out of his shoulders, but he still looked hesitant.

  “I was so furious with you,” she began. “But more furious with myself. Things . . . happened so quickly between us, and I was ready to give myself to you with no thought of consequences. I couldn’t help but think the worst of your intentions after I discovered you were Essex.”

  “Well,” he said gruffly, “I’ll own they were never that honorable, Minerva. I wanted under your skirts from the moment we met.”

  Suddenly the room was much too warm. She’d forgotten how wonderfully frank he could be.

  “But I never . . .” He cleared his throat and fixed her with such a tormented expression her heart flipped. “I never would have touched you that night had I not already made up my mind to wed you. My mistake was not making sure you wanted the same—if you could want the same after I told you everything. But I cocked things up, didn’t I? That night you were so lovely, though, and I was so weak, and . . . I just wanted you, Minerva. I couldn’t help myself.”

  Oh, good Lord, this man. Suddenly nothing mattered but being close to him and feeling those long, ink-stained fingers all over her skin, that deep, rumbling voice, full of nonsense and eloquence both, in her ear as he did wicked, wicked things. She wanted his warm embrace she’d known too fleetingly; she wanted to be engulfed entirely in bay rum and sandalwood and Marlowe—in miles of muscle and sinew and shockingly soft skin.

  She’d wanted him too—still did. She stepped forward until they collided and stopped any more desperate words he might utter with a kiss.

  He stiffened only momentarily before all of the stress and fatigue and unhappiness seemed to melt from his body, and then he began to return the kiss like a man who’d been denied water for too long, lips desperate and gasping and clumsy for more. His arms wrapped around her, sturdy and warm, and tightened their hold until no space remained between them, unwilling to part from her anytime soon.

  When she finally managed to come up from air, dizzy with his kisses and half-mad for more, she said, “I’m sorry, Marlowe.”

  He was busy pressing kisses to her temple, behind her ears, and the edge of her jaw. “Hmm? Whatever for?” he murmured absently.

  “For always being so quick to think the worst.”

  He paused for a moment, considering her words. He brought up his hands and cupped her face, tilted it upward so she had no choice but to meet his eyes. They were as soft as melted chocolate, and he looked . . . content, as she’d never seen before. And she realized that even at his most languid, there had always been a restlessness to him that had precluded him from ever being truly at peace. The restlessness was finally gone now, however, and her heart swelled even more at the thought that she was responsible for his peace.

  “Nothing in your life had ever suggested it was a wise idea to think otherwise,” he said gently. “I cannot fault you for protecting yourself, Minerva.”

  “You were only doing the same, weren’t you?”

  He grimaced and looked reluctant to answer her. She waited patiently, expectantly, her hands stroking the planes of his chest, until he finally gave in.

  “My family—and Caroline—always ridiculed my poetry. I suppose it just became easier to hide it than to worry about what people might think of me. And after a while, it ceased to matter . . . until I met you. By the time I worked up the nerve to tell you, I’d lied to you for so long I knew you would hate me for it. You were right. I was trapped by my own cowardice.”

  She brought her hand up to the rough, unshaved surface of his cheek. “Well, you had one thing very wrong. I don’t hate you. And by the by—other than your sisters, of course—your family is the absolute worst.”

  He grinned that devilish grin of his that never ceased to take away her good sense. “So will you have me, then?” he asked. “Will you be my wife and a mother to my daughters?”

  “I could think of nothing I’d like so well,” she said. “Though I am certain Laura and Beatrice shall have something to say about the latter.”

  “They have already made their opinion clear,” he said. “They’ve threatened a coup unless I wooed you back. My wardrobe was the first casualty.”

  “Your banyans?”

  “One survived—only because I was wearing it,” he said ruefully. “You’ve won their hearts, just as you’ve won mine.”

  Well, then. How was she to argue with that? And how had he fooled her for so long, when he said such devastatingly perfect things as that? “Then I will marry you,” she said firmly. “Now take me to bed. Properly this time.”

  He looked gobsmacked by her boldness, then positively ravenous. “Only if you’re absolutely certain,” he said, as if it pained him.

  She pushed her way out of his embrace and gave him her sternest glare—which she doubted was very stern at all, considering how giddy she felt. “Surely the man who wrote The Hedonist would not be so reticent.”

  “The man who loves you would make sure,” he countered, a wicked glint in his eyes despite his noble words. “And if it is the hedonist you’re wanting tonight, I’m afraid I can’t oblige. I’m rather in the mood to play the chevalier.”

  Ooh. Well. That sounded very promising indeed. “Canto three?”

  “Canto three, verse five,” he confirmed, closing the distance between them once more. A moment later, she was in his arms, her legs wrapped around his waist, and he was carrying her across the room toward his massive bed as if she weighed nothing at all. “In which the chevalier carries his Italian bride to the marriage bed.”

  “I’m not Italian,” she countered, breathless.

  He grinned down at her. “No, you’re fey, aren’t you?”

  “Thought I was a nymph,” she mock grumbled.

  “You’re mine is what you are,” he growled.

  She felt that growl all over. “You’ll have no arguments from me.”

  “It’s a bloody miracle, then,” he murmured.

  “Why, you . . .”

  But before she could work herself up any further, he bit her bottom lip and ran his fingertips over just the right spot on her thigh, for through some magic unbeknownst to her, he’d already managed to find his way under her skirts. She couldn’t help the moan that escaped her lips at his perfect touch.

  “No pantaloons tonight?” he asked huskily.
r />   “It is . . . a warm night,” she managed between his caresses.

  Marlowe’s grin deepened even further, and he tossed her into the middle of the giant four-poster, then proceeded to crawl over her in a manner that reminded her of some exotic jungle cat, all sleek and rangy and intent on his prey. He made short work of her gown and slippers and seemed to delight in tormenting her as he slowly—much too slowly—rolled her stockings down her legs one by one, peppering her skin with kisses as he went.

  She fought back by pulling at his lawn shirt until he was forced to pause his ministrations and shrug out of it, revealing for the first time his broad shoulders and bare torso for her delectation. She’d imagined too many times to count what he must look like beneath those untidy clothes of his, but the reality was more glorious. She ran her hands up his chest, tangling in the dark mat of curls dusting his belly and pectorals, sliding over the smooth skin of his shoulders and down the hard, sculpted planes of his back.

  He was a beautiful man, a far cry from that drunken, bloated mess she’d first encountered two years ago. Yet that disparity made him even more attractive to her. His body was a bit beaten around the edges, filled with cracks and fissures that spoke of a lifetime of crushing disappointments and hard living. His beauty was hard-won and sometimes hard to spot beneath all of those masks he donned for the world. But she had spotted it and could not help but revel in it now as she ran her hands over that burning hot, naked flesh until he shuddered from her touch.

  He caged her beneath him, arms and legs lightly pinning her in place, as if he was still concerned she planned to escape him, despite her roaming hands and boneless body. He leant over her and kissed her, openmouthed and fierce, and took one of her hands in his, guided it down to the front of his nankeens, and pressed. The feel of him, so hard and hot and . . . formidable sent a flash of heat straight to her core.

  But when she reached for his falls to finally release him, he caught up her hands and pinned them above her head, looking halfway in agony.

  “Not yet. Won’t last a second if you do that,” he breathed, as if it took every ounce of his remaining control to admit it.